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Critical Military Studies ISSN: 2333-7486 (Print) 2333-7494 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcms20 "A room of one’s own(?)" in battlespace – women soldiers in war rooms Ayelet Harel-Shalev To cite this article: Ayelet Harel-Shalev (2018): "A room of one’s own(?)" in battlespace – women soldiers in war rooms, Critical Military Studies To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2018.1494882 Published online: 31 Jul 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcms20 CRITICAL MILITARY STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2018.1494882 "A room of one’s own(?)" in battlespace – women soldiers in war rooms Ayelet Harel-Shalev Conflict Management and Resolution Program, and the Department of Politics and Government, Ben- Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY At present, women serve in a variety of combat roles and combat Received 11 November 2017 support positions in various militaries around the globe. In parallel, Accepted 23 May 2018 new technologies of warfare are transferring more and more KEYWORDS soldiers, including women, from the sidelines into the heart of feminist IR; war rooms; the battlespace. More women soldiers are thus becoming signifi- women soldiers; conflict cant participants in war by virtue of their assignment to strategic zones; military; battlespace war rooms. As one of the women soldiers interviewed in this study explained: ‘In the war-room, you see everything. You see more than the soldiers in the field see; you see the whole picture’. Even though such women soldiers are not located physically in the battlefield, they do indeed participate in warfare by promoting ‘security’ for their countries and for their comrades in arms and by being responsible for injuring the ‘other’. The stationing of women in war rooms located on the borders of conflict zones, which are equipped with the latest technologies that bring the reality of the warzone into the war room, may challenge traditional concepts of security, war, and gender roles. The narratives of women soldiers serving in such war rooms can thus provide critical insights into ‘experiencing war’ and ‘making war’ in battlespace. Personal inter- views with 30 Israeli women whose mandatory military service was spent in war rooms revealed multiple narratives of war, including the intertwining of protection, security, and insecurity. The paper thus sheds new light on the role of women in the military by exploring women ‘in a room of their own’ in battlespace. Women around the globe serve in a variety of combat roles and combat-support positions in the military establishments of their countries. Within these establishments, the ongoing introduction of new technologies of warfare is placing more and more women soldiers in influential positions, with many becoming significant participants in war by virtue of their assignment to strategic war rooms (also known as operations or situation rooms). The stationing of women combat-support soldiers in war rooms may thus challenge traditional concepts of security, war, and gender roles. The current article aims to explore the narratives of women soldiers who have served in war ‘rooms of their own’ (Woolf 1929/2015), with the dual purpose of learning about CONTACT Ayelet Harel-Shalev [email protected] © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 A. HAREL-SHALEV their everyday experiences and the challenges they faced and of exploring new framings for analysis of the new war environment. In modern warfare, a war room, being a command centre that serves as a point of coordination for military activities, may be located either in proximity to the battlefield or at a distance. Indeed, when one thinks of a war room, it is difficult not to recall the image of the US leadership watching the Bin-Laden capture in 2011. While Special Forces Units were operating in Pakistan, the leadership – ensconced in a secure situation room in Washington, DC – was watching a huge plasma screen with live images of Special Forces soldiers conducting their mission of capturing and killing their target. The current study does not deal with such distant safe command centres but focuses rather on the experiences of women soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in war rooms located in proximity to the battlefield – in this case, on Israel’s various borders and in actual conflict zones. Such war rooms were eloquently described by Shiri, an operations officer interviewed in this study, in explaining her role in a war room located on the border between Israel and the West Bank: Everything reaches the war room, from the smallest details, such as administrative matters, vehicles that are stuck [in enemy territory], or missing equipment etc., through issues of wounded soldiers, up to the larger events of an operation … shooting, fighting, etc. …. There are many routine ordinary things, but the core activity of war rooms is functioning during battles and emergency situations [on the border or inside enemy territory]. Michal, an operations sergeant, further explained the significance of military service in war rooms equipped with visual technologies and the contribution of these technol- ogies to forces in the battlefield: In the war room, you see everything. You see more than the soldiers in the field see; you see the whole picture …. When the men soldiers from my troop were ‘in’ [the battlefield] … they did not see terrorists coming toward them, but … I saw … I had to tell them to step back …. (quoted in Harel-Shalev & Daphna-Tekoah 2016b, 324) Even though women such as Shiri and Michal are not positioned physically in the battlefield, their participation in war is significant, and it is this type of participation that raises questions regarding the status of women in the new battlespace (Manjikian 2010). To address such questions, this study analyses interviews with Israeli women soldiers who served in war rooms in or near conflict zones and were thus an indis- pensable part of a war effort. Analysis of the interviews reveals multiple narratives of war, including the intertwining of protection, security, and insecurity. During the fieldwork, it was surprising to find that this aspect of war – women in war rooms – is understudied. While much has been written about the integration of women into the military (e.g. Sasson-Levy 2003; MacKenzie 2015; Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah 2016b) and about the use of new technologies in the wars of today (Masters 2005, 2008; Manjikian 2010), very few scholarly works have addressed women soldiers’ experiences in strategic war rooms near the battlefield – experiences in which women soldiers have begun to take a leading role in ‘managing war’ and in ‘achieving security’. In the context of the ever-growing knowledge on security, the narratives of women soldiers in war rooms can assist scholars to re-evaluate and explore different aspects of the concepts of security and war. Such narratives may challenge both the ‘conventional-wisdom’ definitions of war and the binary conceptualization of warfare as an explicitly gendered act in which soldiers (usually men) actively protect allegedly CRITICAL MILITARY STUDIES 3 passive and weak female subjects (Shepherd 2006; Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah 2016b). Women soldiers should, however, not be regarded as a unified group. Experiences of women in the military are diverse and can vary markedly from one soldier to another, depending largely on the particular roles of the women during their military service. Lomsky- Feder and Sasson Levy (2018), for example, describe how the experiences of women soldiers serving in posts that are traditionally regarded as feminine, such as secretaries and admin- istrators, are completely different from those of women in so-called masculine roles, such as combat soldiers or commanders. They also remind us that women serving in military intelligence posts experience yet another type of service, since brainpower, rather than physical capability, is the determining factor in awarding such posts to women and men alike (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson Levy 2018, 54). It is against this background that I sought to position women serving in war rooms on the continuum of military experiences and to investigate how these women soldiers perceive their service in gendered terms. Today, war rooms form a substantial part of the newly framed battlespace. Although ‘war room’ is not a new term in war histories, war rooms on the front line may decentralize power structures and represent a relatively new form of battlespace. By examining the narratives of women soldiers serving in war rooms that are located, conceptually, on the border between the home front and the traditional battlefield, one can trace how these women take part in managing wars in the space between the home front and the battlefield. The current research thus aims to explore the experiences of Israeli women soldiers who served in strategic war rooms during their military service or reserve duty. Warfare, gender, and knowledge about the new battlespace Cynthia Enloe asks academics to look for what she terms ‘silences’ in international relations (IR; Enloe 1989/2014). She advises scholars to seek questions that are thus far unidentified and unasked in IR and to investigate issues that conventional commenta- tors typically leave unexplored (Enloe 2015, 3). These spaces of query often remain unexplored because they are not considered interesting or sufficiently important. In these silences, she notes, you will often find politics (Enloe 2014; Manjikian 2014). Enloe (2015) further guides us to critically study how militaries are sustained, deployed, and utilized (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy 2016; Basham, Belkin, and Gifkins 2015; Baker et al. 2016). It was this call to arms that led me to pursue the current research about the unexplored issue of women soldiers in war rooms.
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